“Not a hundred percent,” Snyder admits. “But he looked straight at me. It was almost…”
“What, Agent Snyder?” she asks, unable to wait.
Snyder speaks slowly. “It was as if he came in to look at us, specifically. He looked right at us. At me. I think he recognized me.” He indicates the steering wheel. “We should drive.”
Singh starts the engine with shaking hands, and steers away from the curb. The town is so small there are only two ways to go, and instinctively she drives out the opposite road from the way they came.
Snyder is thinking aloud. “He disappeared the night of the fire because he’d been burned. We couldn’t find him because he was in intensive care somewhere, under another identity. He would have had to have some major medical work. Burn unit, rehab.”
Singh watches the road and forces her jittery mind still. She continues his train of thought. “He could also have been in hiding. Thinking he had been personally targeted, that it was imperative for him to disappear. Perhaps the Colonel paid for private care in some off-the-grid setup. It would have taken years of surgeries and skin grafts for him to be functional again.”
“The question is, how functional is he?” Agent Snyder asks, his voice tense.
Singh looks at him, her breath suddenly shallow.
Snyder continues. “In his condition he wouldn’t be able to subdue a teenager, even a young teenager. But a five-year old…”
She shivers, but is following him. “Aaron Light. Strauss is choosing younger victims because that is all he is capable of now.”
The agents look at each other in realization. And Snyder says softly,
“Child predators never stop. They do it until they die.”
When Jean Lange returns to her house a few miles out of Snake River, Singh and Snyder are seated on the sagging couch on the porch, waiting for her. They stand as she exits her vehicle.
Lange recognizes Snyder instantly. It is clear from the terror on her face.
Snyder steps forward toward her. His voice conveys firm, implacable authority. “Ms. Lange, I think you know we’re not going to leave. And I know you don’t want to be seen talking with us on your front porch. The sooner you let us in, the safer it will be. For all of us.”
It is only another moment before she unlocks the door and lets them pass, closing and bolting the door behind her.
The house is cluttered. Beer cans and liquor bottles on the coffee table, dirty glasses on the windowsill and the floor, overflowing ash trays.
Singh suspects the debris is not Lange’s. The woman seems embarrassed, even mortified, reaching to picking up carelessly discarded chips packages and beer cans as she speaks nervously. “I haven’t had time—”
“It’s quite all right,” Agent Snyder says kindly. “Please don’t bother for us.”
His reassurance calms her somewhat, but she continues to tidy as Snyder speaks.
“You remember me, don’t you, Ms. Lange?”
She shoots a glance at him, gives a quick, distracted nod.
“Seven years ago, you knew something that you wanted to tell my partner and me, despite the potential danger to yourself. Are you aware that a five-year-old boy went missing in Glacier National Park a few months ago?”
She stops her nervous cleaning and straightens, standing with her face turned away from them.
Snyder continues, gently. “It seems whatever was going on seven years ago is still going on, or it’s started up again. Maybe it’s time to tell someone what you know.”
She begins walking the room, seeming far too jumpy to sit down. “I knew you’d be back.”
“Did you?” Snyder asks. “Why is that?”
“Cause Strauss came back.”
Singh’s eyes meet Agent Snyder’s. He speaks casually. “We thought he’d died in that explosion in the woods, the one that happened the night after we met you.”
Lange shifts, uncomfortably. “I guess you’d know about that, him getting caught in that fire.”
“But he came back into town recently?” Snyder suggests.
“Four or five months ago. Hurt real bad.” She shivers.
“Do you know where he’d been?
She gives a quick shake of her head. Singh thinks there is no reason not to believe her.
Snyder continues. “Seven years ago you were speaking to us of Timothy Whitcomb, who disappeared from Flathead Lake that October. But there was another, wasn’t there? That’s why you called us.”
She drops her eyes, her head, and speaks, so low that Singh has to stop breathing to hear. “Danny Porter.”
Snyder and Singh lock eyes. A new name.
“Tell us about Danny,” Snyder says.
Chapter 105
Portland - present
Roarke and Epps
It took the better part of the drive to the airport to fill Epps in on the ATF case in Snake River. The other agent was scarily intent at the wheel.
“So the intel from this waitress was that the hardware store owner, Strauss, had abducted Timothy Whitcomb.”
“That he might have,” Roarke corrected. “Nothing was ever definitive—”
“But you met the guy,” Epps said, glancing at him from the driver’s seat.
Roarke was remembering the photos of the baseball team on the hardware store walls, all those boys. And the flat, unfocused look on Strauss’s face when Roarke tried to talk to him about the coaching.
“Yeah. I met him. If I had a kid that age, I wouldn’t want Strauss around him.”
Roarke hadn’t let it go. Not entirely. He’d checked the databases occasionally over the next few years. Plugging in missing boys from eight to fifteen. Putting a flag out for murders of boys of the same age range. In two or three years, he’d followed up on three potentials, but two were eventually solved and the other—just didn’t fit. And he’d never been able to find the slightest trace of Strauss.
He said so to Epps, and finished, “As far as I know, no one ever heard from Strauss again. Best guess is he died in the explosion.”
“But you don’t know.”
“I don’t know.” Roarke continued reluctantly. “And then in October, Aaron Light disappeared from the Glacier area. I didn’t know that until Chuck called about it in December. We—the team—was so focused on the Lindstrom case… and by then we were dealing with the pimp murders… ”
And Jade, and Rachel, and Bitch…
“And you didn’t think Aaron Light fit because he was just five.” Epps pondered it, staring out at the road in front of them.
“More to the point, Chuck was never on the Aaron Light case. It was his mind, playing tricks—”
Epps interrupted. “Obviously Tara thinks there’s a hell of a lot more to it. Why else… why would she go off—why would they go off on their own like that….”
Roarke realized it was beyond time for him to come clean. “There’s something I have to tell you. Singh isn’t talking to you because… what I mean is, it’s not about you. There are things you don’t know—”
Epps exploded. “I don’t know? No. You haven’t said. She hasn’t said.” His agitation was clear in his voice, in his body, in the clenching of his hands on the wheel. “How much of an idiot do you think I am?”
And Roarke realized Epps was right. He was the one who had been an idiot, for ever thinking Epps hadn’t sensed it all, all along.
Epps drove on in agitated silence. When he spoke again, his voice was toneless, but calm. “What these women have been through. We can’t judge it. The violence of their everyday lives. That—predator in charge, appointing more predators every day. They are insane with rage and grief. And Cara…” He trailed off as he stopped the SUV at a light. As the engine idled, he turned in his seat to face Roarke. “Maybe Cara just knew it sooner.”
The agents looked at each other, really looked at each other. And Roarke felt the wall between them crumble softly to sand.
Chapter 106
Snake River, Montana - pres
ent
Singh and Snyder
The agents have finally convinced Jean Lange to sit. Her face and voice soften as she speaks of these people she has obviously known for some years.
“The Porters are local, longtime. Grandparents, great-grands. Trish Porter married an out-of-towner, and four, five years ago he up and left her. Her and the kids moved back in with her dad.” Her eyes are dark, empathetic. “So she’s there raising two kids on a farm… caring for her father until he passed. She had to get some shit job in Kalispell to make ends meet.” She stops for a moment, lost in thought. When she continues, it is with great reluctance. “Danny was twelve or thirteen years old, sweet kid.”
Hearing this age is electrifying. It takes all of Singh’s self-discipline has not to react.
“Trish’s girl Maise is the smart one. A little younger than Danny. Neither of ‘em really fit into this town, if you know what I mean. And Danny… he was big for his age, really handsome boy…” She stops, looks away, jiggling her crossed leg nervously on top of the other.
“And that became a problem for him?” Agent Snyder suggests.
She nods to him. “I saw you and your partner sitting in the diner watching Strauss’s store and that’s when I thought you’d put it together. The Whitcomb boy, and Danny…”
“What happened to Danny?” Snyder asks evenly.
Lange looks down at her hands in her lap. “What everyone says is he run off. California or some such. Trish told me the sheriff found a lady working at the bus terminal in Kalispell who sold him a ticket for cash.”
Snyder and Singh exchange a glance. The sheriff.
“Well, what are you going to do? Sheriff tells you something like that…” Lange trails off, looking bleak. “What are you gonna do?”
Singh has the sense she is talking about more than the situation. About her entire life.
“But Maise didn’t believe it. She’d come in the diner and sit right up at that same table you guys were at. She’d do her homework there at the window and make a Coke last a long, long time.”
“She was watching Strauss’s store?” Singh asks softly.
Jean nods. “I mean… other people seen Strauss looking at various boys…”
“Like you saw him looking at Timothy Whitcomb.”
She drops her eyes. “People knew. She was close with her brother. She would know.”
“Did you ever talk to her about it?”
Again she looks away. “I told her to pray for her brother and don’t give up hope, but she should help her Ma ’stead of sitting in the diner all day. I told her it was no good for her or her Ma.”
She looks at them now, defensive. “No good was gonna come from her staking out Abraham Strauss.”
“Of course not. You’re one hundred percent right about that,” Agent Snyder assures her.
“Everybody talks. And she was a kid. What could she do?”
Singh thinks of Strauss, the melted man in his wheelchair, and has an odd, electric flicker of intuition. No, nothing a lone girl could do. But what if she had help?
Then Jean Lange is speaking again.
“When I read about the other boy missing in Flathead it brought it all up again. And you Feds showed up and I just knew that’s why you were here. I guess I figured… I owed her.”
Agent Snyder says gently, “But you didn’t tell us about Maise.”
She stiffens. “You said you was—were —here about the Brigade. I’m sorry, but I can’t have nothing to do with that. You don’t know. You just don’t know.”
Snyder’s voice is gentle, an absolution. “You’re right, we don’t. But Ms. Lange, I just need to ask you… when did Danny Porter go missing?”
Even though Singh knows what Lange is going to say, the words are like a thunderclap.
“It was 2009.”
The year Young John Doe was dumped by the Columbia River.
Lange continues, “But Strauss disappeared and folks said he was dead. There were no more kids, you know, missing. So I thought, well, that’s the end of that.”
Not the end for Danny’s sister and mother, Singh thought. Not for Timothy Whitcomb’s family. She feels a wave of nausea, thinking of the limbo they must all still be living in. Never knowing.
Jean Lange bristles, as if hearing her thoughts. “No, I didn’t call any police. What good would it’ve done? Sheriff has jurisdiction and they’d only pass it on to him.”
Of course it must feel inescapable, Singh thinks. Growing up in a town like this, run like an isolated kingdom by a group of fanatic, authoritarian, heavily armed men. She must force herself back to the conversation at Agent Snyder’s next words.
“We need to speak to Maise Porter. Do you know where she is?”
Lange gives him a quick, furtive look. “Pretty soon after you feds came here. Her and her Ma both.”
Especially if Maise had anything to do with the armament explosion, Singh realizes.
“I got Trish a job at the park,” Trish finishes.
“Glacier, you mean?”
“Yeah. I do some work there, summers. Trish asked if I could put in a word. The two of ‘em moved house and didn’t come back. Don’t know ‘bout Trish, but I’m pretty sure Maise works there, now.”
“Isn’t the park closed until spring?” Agent Snyder asks, surprised.
“They hire people in early to do the cleaning and prep for the season. The hotel at Many Glacier.”
Singh and Snyder exchange a glance.
“Thank you, Ms. Lange,” Agent Snyder says, softly. “Thank you.”
Back in the SUV, Singh has barely shut the door before she is turning to Agent Snyder. “It was Strauss we saw.”
Alive, horribly burned and injured.
Snyder begins, “And Danny Porter—”
“Is Young John Doe,” Singh finishes.
“We need to move on,” Snyder says, glancing out at the house. “And hope for Lange’s sake that no one saw us here.”
Singh drives to the next town, where they park outside a motel and use their tablets to connect to the database of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, searching for Danny Porter’s name.
The search quickly confirms what they already know: Danny Porter is not listed among the missing.
“Sheriff Preston made sure he never got listed,” Singh guesses.
“Or he removed him,” Agent Snyder agrees.
“So Strauss, with or without the help of the other militia men, moved Danny’s body and dumped him in the vicinity of the Street Hunter’s newly unearthed victim.”
Snyder stares out the windshield. “He may have done it himself. But the militia had a lot to protect. The snowmobile sales route and their weapons buying took any numbers of the Colonel’s salesmen all over the Pacific Northwest. It wouldn’t have been difficult to transport a body in a delivery van.”
Singh felt a fierce hope. “If Danny is Young John Doe, Maise can identify the body. We will be able to confirm through matching their DNA. We can bring him to rest, and ease her mind.”
“Yes. Maise is the key.”
But Jean Lange has also informed them that Many Glacier Hotel is far enough into the park that there is no internet—nor even cell phone reception. They have no way of contacting Maise except to go to her.
The agents both reach for their phones simultaneously to cue up the GPS directions They study the maps on their phones.
It is a four and a half-hour drive to Many Glacier Hotel, on the east side of the park. There is only one direct route through the park, the legendary Going-to-the-Sun Road, and it will be impassable this time of year. They will have to drive up into Canada and circle well above the park on Canadian 3, the re-enter the US, to access Highway 2 on the east side of the park to get to the Many Glacier Entrance Station and the hotel there.
The agents look at each other.
“Let’s go,” Snyder says softly.
Chapter 107
Alberta, Canada - present
&n
bsp; Singh and Snyder
Singh wakes to motion. She opens her eyes to find herself in the passenger seat of the ATV, with Agent Snyder at the wheel, driving the winding road. She had been lulled into sleep by the soporific motion of the vehicle.
Her body is cramped, both from the seat and from of one of those irritatingly real-life dreams in which she had been hunched in a chair over a computer keyboard, doing endless data entry.
Her subconscious rehashing the feeling of their ViCAP work. As boring a dream as it could be.
And yet…
She frowns, trying to remember.
The dream dissipates as Snyder smiles at her, speaking from behind the wheel. “Good. I was about to wake you. The view is getting pretty unmissable.”
Singh lets the dream go and turns to look through her window. The scenery outside the vehicle is indeed, breathtaking. The layered black and gray and white clouds in an endless sky above. White-barked birch trees. Wide snowy fields under sharp blue glacier-carved peaks. Sheer cliff faces. A river running alongside the sidewinder road.
A highway sign flashes by, indicating the miles to Many Glacier Entrance Station. They had been driving in Canada and are now back across the US border—
And Singh goes still, remembering.
In her dream, she had not been entering data into ViCAP. It had been the ViCLAS database. The Canadian version.
Her assignment here with Agent Snyder, from the start, has been the database.
Of course.
“Agent Snyder!” she says, so loudly he brakes and pulls off the road to the shoulder. “What in the world—”
She is already unbuckling her seat belt to fumble for her phone. “In your narrative, you said the Wolf crossed borders to kill: Montana to Idaho. If we are this close to the Canadian border, would he not have done some of his hunting across the border, perhaps thinking that that would confuse jurisdictions even more? And if he crossed the border into Canada…”
Snyder finishes with her. “They have ViCLAS.”
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